Teleworking Will Be The Future?
from the everybody's-teleworking-now dept
A new study sponsored by AT&T (so, there's a bias there) is predicting that 80% of companies will have "teleworkers" in the next two years. Right now, it's 54%. Of course, people have been predicting a shift to more home-based workers for years, but it's never caught on the way people expect. However, now that the technology is making it so you really can work from anywhere, it isn't a huge surprise that more people will be working from places other than the office. Also, the definition they used for "teleworker" is much broader than you would probably think, and thus, the 80% number may not be as useful as you might think. They consider a "teleworker" to be anyone who works from outside the office more than 20% of the time. In other words, your everyday traveling salesman is now a teleworker.
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Starving Teleworker Babies of Africa
An unintended consequence of all those do-gooders wiring up remote third-world villages, peace corps workers feeding babies so they can have more babies -- our image of Ethiopia in the future could be toddlers with every single bone visible, hunched over data entry terminals.
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Re: Starving Teleworker Babies of Africa
Huh? Ohhhhh, I get it. Digital sweat shops! So you want to extrapolate the outsourcing going on in India and other off-shore sites today to Ehiopia (it won't happen there, but I get the point). Interesting. Maybe a side discussion to the meaning of this article, which really meant U.S. workers no longer all going into the same office every day.
For your argument you'll find that today's parallel of, say, sneaker sweat shops, that the workers in them - while having much lower standards of living than the U.S. - are higher than others in their country that don't have those jobs. I am not making a value judgment about whether it is right to give these workers a higher standard of living than their peers - and well below what the eventual consumers - but you should at least consider that fact in your analysis.
Personally, I would be for letting offshore digital laborers not have the jobs and starve while keeping the jobs here in the U.S. for the plenty of laid off IT workers, but that's me.
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Re: Starving Teleworker Babies of Africa
"Huh? Ohhhhh, I get it. Digital sweat shops! So you want to extrapolate the outsourcing going on in India and other off-shore sites today to Ehiopia (it won't happen there, but I get the point)."
Actually, it can. Data entry requires much less skill.
"Maybe a side discussion to the meaning of this article, which really meant U.S. workers no longer all going into the same office every day."
Can't separate the two. The Ethiopian worker is no less accessible than a local worker.
"...sneaker sweat shops, that the workers in them - while having much lower standards of living than the U.S. - are higher than others in their country that don't have those jobs."
Shoes are a different industry with higher overhead costs. Because the cost of relocating factories is higher, the workers can ask for higher wages. In the zero-overhead IT industry, jobs can go instantly to the lowest bidder.
"Personally, I would be for letting offshore digital laborers not have the jobs and starve while keeping the jobs here in the U.S. for the plenty of laid off IT workers, but that's me."
There are a lot of stopgap solutions. The true solution is worldwide prosperity, which will increase job opportunities for all. There are no easy solutions.
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phone company
The *only* people who have been predicting a growth in teleworking have been those with a vested interest in the communications infrastructure. The bottom line is that most people don't want to telework - there are many, many reasons why it is just a stupid idea (I know there are reasons why it is good too, but the negatives outweight the postitives for most people)
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Reality of teleworking
Every teleworking opportunity I've seen just
boils down to working from home at night after
you've spent your 9-12 hours at the office.
In my experience, most managers are too anal to
trust their workers if they are not in sight at all
times.
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